December 31, 2014

The State And The Market

I spent yesterday at a really fun roundtable on the State and the Market at Bar Ilan University. The roundtable, organized by Tsilly Dagan and me (well, really just Tsilly, who did all the work) featured several paper panels and discussion on issues that will interest Lounge readers interested in Taboo Trades. Yuval Feldman presented an interesting paper (as always) about an MTurk study of subtle conflicts of interest – when “good people do bad things,” and Hila Shamir presented some early-stage research on how the state can support women in the workplace, in particular, working mothers.

I’m, of course, partial to my own panel, which featured Benny Shmueli’s paper on the alienability of the get (the Jewish divorce bill) and Ram Rivlin’s analysis of why we perceive certain transactions as taboo when the trading is among strangers, yet accept similar intra-familial transfers as uncontroversial. I discussed commodification in the oocyte market – specifically, two cases of first impression in the United States (one an antitrust suit against the American Society For Reproductive Medicine and the other a tax case regarding the proper treatment of income earned from egg “donation.”)

But the stars of the show were undoubtedly Tsilly Dagan and Talia Fisher, whose paper on the fragmentation and tradability of sovereignty makes even the proposal by my colleagues Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati (on the same panel) to marketize sovereign control look tame in comparison.

We are happy to invite you for a roundtable on “The State and the Market” to be held December 30th 2014 at Bar Ilan University Faculty of Law (room # 300 @ the Banin building).

Please find below a short description of the focus of our discussions as well as our schedule

Tsilly Dagan & Kimberly D. Krawiec

The State and The Market

The intersection of the state and the market is the center of attention of many theoretical perspectives and disciplines. The ways in which states design their markets and set their borders has a major effect on the nature of society, and the identities of individuals within it. At the same time markets (in goods, in services, investments as well as the market-like competition between states under globalization) alter states’ policies and capabilities and curtail their sovereign powers.

In this workshop, we wish to encourage participants to present their work in progress focusing on the description, explanation, and the normative evaluation of the mutual effects of states and markets: the cases where the two institutions limit one another and the cases where they facilitate each other’s prosperity.

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16:30- 17:30 When State and Market Interact

Yuval Feldman & Eliran Haleli , “Exploring the Potential Role of Law in Enhancing Neutrality in Subtle Conflicts of Interest Situations‫.”

Hila Shamir, “Designing Legal Mechanisms for the Promotion of Women: the Market, The State, The Family and the Public Good”

17:45-19:15 Taboo Trades

Kimberly D. Krawiec, “Commodification (Or Not) In The Oocyte Market”

Benny Shmueli, “Trading the Right to Divorce: On Inalienability, Commodification, and Using Liability Rules in Cases of Refusal to Divorce”